Especially if you spend 7 days working on it! *nervous laughter*
Write Often
I attended Maggie Stiefvater’s “Portraits and Dreams” workshop in February, which was amazing. One piece of advice she gave was to write a lot of short stories, and write them often. (She gave similar advice two years ago at her “Seven Sentences” workshop, but I was apparently not ready to take it then yet. In other news, take as many of Maggie’s workshops as you can.)
After all, she said, the hardest part of writing is translating the beautiful abstract story from your head into words on the page. Nothing can help you get faster except lots and lots of practice. Completing a whole story arc over and over, which short stories allow you to do, helps you get faster at the translation part. She and two of her author friends committed to doing one story a week each, and they found the practice really helpful. You can read some results and about the process in The Curiosities.
Do the Pre-Work
Having just rewritten a 1,500-word story at least five times in seven days, I can confirm that translation is hard. For me, I had trouble even figuring out what I meant to say, but that might just be another way of saying “translating the feeling and impression in my head onto words is hard.” I did at least write the end first, advice I got from Jonathan Maberry (who credits it to someone I’ve forgotten), but then I changed the ending.
I find that my prose “sets up” (like concrete) a lot faster in a short story. Writing longhand first would help me be less precious about the words. Because I was writing for a contest with a low-ish word count limit, I kept worrying about that. Do not do this. Instead, get everything down first and then trimming and eliminating. I hope Future Me will remember this.
Rewrite Blind
Another technique Maggie suggested was the “blind rewrite,” or I might call it the “fresh start rewrite.” After you’ve analyzed your story and figured out what’s wrong, start with a completely blank page and rewrite from scratch. It’s doesn’t take me more than 90 minutes to write 1,500 words if I’m not too focused on getting the “right” words down. I found myself longing for clever turns of phrase from the previous draft, but you can always go back and grab them. I found that sometimes I had come up with even cleverer ways to phrase things by remembering only the impression that I had.
As I got to later revisions, I only wrote the new snippets from scratch, but I did them before diving back into the existing prose. That kept me from being too in love with old words to truly write the new words I wanted.
Find the Contrast
Maggie says the most interesting bits of writing are the points of greatest contrast. Even/especially for novels, she likes to think up the pivotal moment and work backwards, to make sure the reader has been properly set up for it. The beauty and difficulty of a short story is that you don’t have much room to fit in a whole character arc, but it can be done! Some short stories are more like tone poems, but if you can build to a dramatic crescendo, why not?
Practice Practicing
Photo by Omar Tursić on Unsplash
The down side is that I spent 7 workdays on this short story instead of working on my novel. Now, I need the practice, I like the result even if it doesn’t win the contest, and it’s good to get away from my novel once in a while. But I do hope that the practice helps me get faster, because I spent an average of like 40 seconds per word on this thing.
But in honor of finishing, enjoy this teaser from the short story. 🙂